The ACLU, which conducted the test, used Amazon’s Rekognition software to compare images of these officials with a publicly available database of 25,00 mugshots. (In an email to Select All, the ACLU declined to identify the database out of privacy concerns.) The false matches transcended party lines, gender, age, and geographical region.

“An identification — whether accurate or not — could cost people their freedom or even their lives,” ACLU technology and civil liberties attorney Jacob Snow wrote. “People of color are already disproportionately harmed by police practices, and it’s easy to see how Rekognition could exacerbate that.”

Amazon’s Rekognition incorrectly matched these 28 members of congress with mugshots from criminal databases.
Photo: United States Congress via ACLU

Among those misidentified was civil-rights icon and Georgia Democratic representative John Lewis, who helped the Congressional Black Congress pen a letter to Amazon in May predicting the dangers Rekognition poses to civil rights.

“It is quite clear that communities of color are more heavily and aggressively policed than white communities,” the letter reads. “The status quo results in an oversampling of data which, once used as inputs to an analytical framework leveraging artificial intelligence, could negatively impact outcomes in those oversampled communities.”

For many companies and governmental agencies, facial-recognition software, big data, and predictive algorithms were intended as a way to simultaneously increase efficiency and transcend our own inherent human biases. This sounds good in theory, but a growing body of research on data collection shows this hopeful wishing is indeed just that. In the end, “unbiased” algorithms and software are only as colorblind as the raw data they are fed.

This year, MIT researchers Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru found that datasets are “overwhelmingly composed of lighter skinned subjects.” This imbalance in data leads to identification errors disproportionately grounded in race. In that same study, the error rate for light-skinned men capped at .8 percent. That seems pretty good, until you look at the error rate for those with dark skin.

“We need to be really careful about how we use this kind of technology,” Diane Greene, Google’s director of cloud computing, said in an interview with the BBC following the ACLU post. Greene went on to warn of, “inherent biases” in facial recognition. (Google is working on its own facial-recognition software as well, but unlike Amazon, theirs is unavailable to the public.)

Underrepresentation and bias cause dysfunction at all levels, but the stakes dramatically increase when government agencies and police join the fold. In an interview with Gizmodo, Brian Brackeen, CEO of AI startup Kairos, who is himself a person of color, warned companies against selling these types of technologies to institutions possessing the power to kill.

Brackeen is not alone. Last, month 20 groups of Amazon shareholders sent a letter to Jeff Bezos expressing concern over Rekognition’s potential to violate civil and human rights.

“We are concerned the technology would be used to unfairly and disproportionately target and surveil people of color, immigrants, and civil society organizations,” the shareholders wrote.

The general public is concerned as well. As of this writing, 60,114 people have signed an ACLU petition urging Amazon cease Rekognition sales to government and police.

It appears this growing tide of opposition has already convinced some. Last month, Orlando’s police department pulled the plug on Rekognition amid droves of criticisms. Making matters worse for Amazon, this new report comes amid a renewed public conversation over other controversial uses of mass data collection, like predictive policing. Whether or not this will have an impact on who Amazon sells its services to remains unknown.

Amazon did not respond to Select All questions about Rekognition’s apparent bias, or their decision to continue offering the service to law enforcement.

#BREAKING: I’m told the entire @BPDAlerts Emergency Response Team has resigned from the team, a total of 57 officers, as a show of support for the officers who are suspended without pay after shoving Martin Gugino, 75. They are still employed, but no longer on ERT. @news4buffalo

In case you were wondering about the unmarked federal agents dotting Washington

Few sights from the nation’s protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily armed riot police around Washington, D.C., in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or names badges. Many of the apparently federal agents have refused to identify which agency they work for. “Tell us who you are, identify yourselves!” protesters demanded, as they stared down the helmeted, sunglass-wearing mostly white men outside the White House. Eagle-eyed protesters have identified some of them as belonging to Bureau of Prisons’ riot police units from Texas, but others remain a mystery.

The images of such heavily armed, military-style men in America’s capital are disconcerting, in part, because absent identifying signs of actual authority the rows of federal officers appear all-but indistinguishable from the open-carrying, white militia members cos-playing as survivalists who have gathered in other recent protests against pandemic stay-at-home orders. Some protesters have compared the anonymous armed officers to Russia’s “Little Green Men,” the soldiers-dressed-up-as-civilians who invaded and occupied western Ukraine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday demanding that federal officers identify themselves and their agency.

To understand the police forces ringing Trump and the White House it helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).